


Ghosts of Ettersberg

by kindkit



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Background Slash, Ettersberg, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Holocaust references, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:33:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindkit/pseuds/kindkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's more than one kind of ghost, and more than one kind of absence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghosts of Ettersberg

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/gifts).



> Although no archive warnings apply, some aspects of this story may be distressing. Please see the end notes for warning details if you would like them.

Thomas wakes from the silence of the dream to the silent house, and endures the usual momentary horror before the waking silence becomes natural and not uncanny. It's not even true silence, merely quiet, tempered by his ticking clock and the creaks of the Folly's old foundations. Thomas breathes deeply, remembering how to relax his locked throat and chest, which ache from unrealised screams. He never screams aloud during nightmares, although he can remember screeches and shouts echoing along hospital corridors and knows it isn't true of everyone.

He stretches and rubs at a knot in his neck. He's in a chair in the library, having told himself earlier that he wouldn't try to sleep. The truth is slightly different: he tried not to sleep, but failed. The book he was reading has been bookmarked, closed, and placed neatly on the side table, and there's a blanket draped over him. Molly, of course.

He certainly doesn't want to sleep again now, and he's too tired and unsettled to read any more. Television, then. Peter never seems to mind when Thomas borrows his little electronic sanctuary.

After brewing a pot of tea--Molly peeps round the kitchen door and then vanishes again--Thomas carries the tray out to the old mews. There's a relief in being here among the gadgets he doesn't understand. He feels lightened, history-less. And even in the middle of the night, one of Peter's many television channels is showing rugby. League, not union, but one can't have everything.

The Bati have just scored a goal against France to their home supporters' vocal delight when Peter comes in, yawning, swaddled in a flannel dressing gown and multi-coloured socks.

"Sorry, Peter, I thought you were - "

"Couldn't sleep. Thought I'd watch a film or something."

"Yes, of course." Thomas gets up and hands him the remote control.

"No, wait, I - " Peter yawns again and rubs his eyes. He needs only a teddy bear to complete the picture of a boy of eight. "Rugby's fine. Stay. If you like, I mean. Sir."

It would be polite to leave him alone. In the nature of things, Thomas takes up a lot of Peter's time; it's not right to intrude on what leisure and privacy he has. But then, he was invited, and he doesn't want to return to the house, with its empty, overlarge rooms. He sits down again. "It is all right to call me Thomas." 

"Yeah, you've said. But it's weird. You're my boss."

"Are you in danger of forgetting that?"

"Not bloody likely."

"Well, then." He's being unfair again. Intrusive. Names and titles are like _formae_ , and perhaps Peter needs to keep things in this shape: superior and subordinate, teacher and pupil. Peter prefers clarity; he struggles for explanations and equations. That he is the first person since 1945 with whom Thomas feels fully at ease is a complicating variable Peter can surely do without. "But of course it's up to you."

Peter nods, and for a little while they watch rugby. "Couldn't you sleep either?" Peter ventures a few minutes later.

"I slept. I dreamed."

Another silence. Out of the corner of his eye, Thomas can see the mannerisms of Peter thinking: his twitching fingers and the way one corner of his mouth folds in. It makes Thomas picture himself as one of Peter's experiments, something to be carefully prodded until it brings forth knowledge. But Peter is kinder than that. Kinder than is probably good for him, as a policeman or a wizard. "Since you're here," Peter says, "I don't suppose you dreamt that all the Bond girls got together and offered you their favours. Or," he adds, not quite casually, "all the Bonds either."

"Nothing so pleasant, no." France takes a penalty for something; Thomas finds he doesn't particularly care what. He's thoroughly distracted now from his distraction, and feels the emotion of the dream ready to sweep over him again. "I - " Thomas closes his mouth around the next words and swallows them. Peter is not his confidant. Peter is a very young man with troubles of his own.

And yet it's late, and Thomas is tired and lonely, and Peter has invited his confidences as clearly as one Englishman ever can to another. "I sometimes have bad dreams, this time of year. It's the poppies, you see. Armistice Day, and everyone talking about war. November and January are the difficult times. January was when it happened."

"Ettersberg," says Peter, with the heavy tact he's always shown on the subject, the tact that means _I won't ask questions, but . . ._

"Ettersberg." There's a silence. The name has been a sort of code to Thomas, both an identification and a concealment, a screen between him and his memories. He calls it _Ettersberg_ , as a man of his father's generation might have said _the Somme_. It's enough, and as much as he can readily bear. But it doesn't explain anything to Peter. "I expect you've looked it up on the internet by now."

Peter shakes his head. "I'm as nosy as any other copper, but I reckoned it wasn't my business."

"It's a hill, a forested ridge actually, near Weimar. It was the location of Buchenwald."

*** 

The stink had most of them gagging before they got close. Only a little of it was physical, from the corpses and the smoke and the starving, diseased, barely-living bodies of the prisoners, both those in the camp itself and those in the special facility. Mostly it was vestigia, layer upon layer of suffering and cruelty that revolted all the senses. A stink, a cacophony, a slithering fear.

Desmond, close beside Thomas as they crept up through the trees, coughed and shuddered. In the darkness Thomas placed a hand on his arm and they were still for perhaps half a second, touching, briefly comforted.

*** 

"You asked me once," Thomas says, "if it was possible to use murder to fuel magic. Well, the Nazis did it on an industrial scale. I think I've mentioned that there was a facility, more or less a factory for the production of magical weapons, at Ettersberg. Its workers were enslaved practitioners from all over Europe. Its fuel was the people in Buchenwald."

Peter says nothing. He's sitting very still, his posture attentive. There's something professional about it--police officers learn how to listen--but it's tinged with the understanding that is the most tolerable kind of sympathy. Peter has never been a soldier, but he too has seen horrors he cannot alleviate.

Thomas looks away from Peter's waiting face, away as best he can from the memories he has set loose in himself. The muted television screen catches his eye. This is what's real now, rugby and Peter and the Folly and commonplace technology that in 1945 would have seemed like magic. Ettersberg was almost seventy years ago. It's absurd to be talking about it, hopelessly self-indulgent. But having begun, he can't bring himself to stop. "Our intelligence got wind of a new project there, something big. I never knew the details. I was only a captain, nobody important. But I gather it was more or less the magical equivalent of an atomic bomb. The War Office seconded nearly every wizard in the forces and parachuted us in."

*** 

Darkness broken by flaring werelights and fireballs, the stink of burning boards and wires and flesh mixed chokingly with vestigia. Teenage boys in SS uniforms, no more than apprentices, their clumsy second-order spells useless against the massed power of experienced British wizards. An easy victory, and then the factory, the practitioners pleading, exhausted, starved and sick, dying in their hundreds amongst the machinery of magical warfare. Their not-quite rescuers moving among them, choosing who could be saved and who only given a last mercy. A few experts lingering to take photographs and gather papers and samples, and for the rest an orderly withdrawal to the field for the scheduled pickup. The rumble of dozens of descending Lysanders and their fighter escorts. Desmond's smile of amazement and relief.

And then the Panzers came out of the woods.

*** 

"They weren't supposed to be there." Thomas closes his eyes, sees the lines of tanks roaring up faster than seemed possible, opens them again. "Bloody cock-up. We had no conventional support and no heavy weaponry. Not so much as a Sten, just our sidearms."

"But you blew them up, didn't you?"

"Two. Others got a few more. But there were . . . I don't know how many. It seemed like hundreds."

"And that's why - ?"

"No. That's not why."

***

He heard Desmond cheer as the second Tiger was destroyed, saw him launch an attack of his own, and then came a crash and a feeling like a battering ram smashing his shoulder and he was on the ground. Desmond turned, appalled shock on his face, and Thomas tried to say _Watch out, you fool, you'll get yourself killed_ but the only sound he made was a whimpering cry. The snow smelled of blood and hot metal and then there was blackness.

He woke, probably not much later, to silence so complete that at first he thought he'd gone deaf. Desmond lay near him, blood drying around his mouth, his nose, and his open eyes. "No," Thomas said, a whispered sound as meaningless in that silence as a dewdrop in the desert, "no," and touched him with the arm he could move. Desmond's face was still warm, but there was no breath against Thomas's palm. His hand came away sticky and red.

He lifted himself a little and saw, in the light of the rising moon, the dark shapes of motionless bodies, motionless tanks. A dead and soundless landscape. The stillness of a painted battlefield. 

There was no vestigia. No trace of magic. Gone, scoured away. 

As he lay back in the snow, he heard an aeroplane coming in to land.

*** 

"The project must have got further along than we knew. I think they had a prototype, a small one, and our lot accidentally triggered it. It killed everyone within a radius of about a quarter of a mile."

"Except you."

"Yes. Except me. I was unconscious. I think that saved me." Thomas rubs his hand on his trouser leg. He can feel, as sharply as though no time has passed at all, the blood and the fading heat of Desmond's body. He rubs harder, trying to erase it, and perhaps he carries on too long, because the next thing he's aware of is Peter standing next to him with a glass in his hand. 

"You'd better have this." It's gin, smelling like the pine trees of Ettersberg and tasting like snow and petrol smoke. Thomas gulps it down anyway. "What you probably _should_ have is treatment for your PTSD, which apparently nobody thought of back in the era of the heroically stiff upper lip, but right now gin will have to do."

Thomas lets Peter refill his glass, and drinks more slowly, feeling the alcohol swirl warmly through him. Blood drops in cold water, he thinks, and detests himself for the metaphor. Sixty million people died in the war. Slaughters were ten a penny. Compared to the survivors of Buchenwald, or Stalingrad, or Nanking, he is lucky. "It wasn't the dark ages, Peter. I was treated. I was in hospital for most of 1945. The war was over before they let me out."

Peter touches his shoulder, awkward as always in his affection, and goes back to his chair. "And then what? You're cured, off you go, get back to work and for God's sake try and look cheerful?"

"That might have been preferable. But there was no work for me to get back to. The war was over, the Folly organisation was in tatters, even Ambrose House had closed. And I - I mustn't pretend my situation was unique. There was no one in Britain who hadn't lost family, friends, perhaps their houses or their work. But I'd lost my whole life, or so I thought at the time. Almost everyone I'd ever known was dead, and those who weren't were mad or broken. They were all gone. My colleagues, my friends. My lover."

Peter nods, not reacting especially to the last word, although he must have understood the implication. How the world has changed, that one can admit such things and hear nothing worse than a slightly overlong pause as Peter searches for words. "I'm sorry. Was . . . he - ?"

"He was killed beside me at Ettersberg. I don't think he suffered much."

"Fucking hell."

"You mustn't romanticise," Thomas says, as he has said it to himself over the years. It's fatally easy to make mountains out of might-have-beens. "It was a wartime affair. We hadn't known each other long, and he was considerably younger than me. I don't suppose it would have lasted."

"Well," Peter says, putting on a brayingly upper-class accent and a Colonel Blimp heartiness, "That's quite all right then. Of course one's got to be _reasonable_ about these things."

Reasonable is a damned good thing to be, and Thomas has worked hard at it. "I loved him. I loved him desperately. Is that unreasonable enough? But he died, and I lived, and I grieved and I wished I had died and my grief faded and I kept on living. I met other men and loved a few of them, and I made other friends - "

"Who?"

" - and I am not ruined, Peter. I'm not destroyed. I've got scars on my shoulder and scars in my memory, but I'm alive, and glad to be."

Peter doesn't answer. He doesn't mention what he's undoubtedly thinking, that Thomas has whiled away most of the years since 1945 cloistered in the Folly, reading books and letting the world pass by. It was a wounded kind of life--he can see that now, so much having changed since he met a young constable who could see ghosts--but a life nevertheless. It can take a wounded man a long time to build up his strength again.

"The hardest thing . . . in January of 1946 I went back to Ettersberg. On the anniversary, to say goodbye. Or so I told myself. The truth is, I was hoping for ghosts. His ghost, in particular. I thought if I could just see him again, talk to him, I might . . . oh, all the usual clichés. Find peace, I suppose. But there was nothing. Just the same silence, the same unnatural absence of vestigia. They were all gone as though they'd never existed."

"Was it the weapon?"

"Yes, I think so. It stripped the magic from living people and the vestigia from the landscape. For a long time I thought it had burnt out all magic. There was boys at Ambrose House being trained, and not one of them made any progress after January 1945. A very few adult wizards fathered children after that time, and none of their children had any magical abilities, even in the most established bloodlines. Magic was dead." It seemed then that he had outlived his life. Meanwhile a new world was being made, an England reimagined brighter and better, and seeing it had hurt.

Peter drums his fingers thoughtfully on the arm of his chair. "But then it came back. A few hints in the sixties, then in the seventies you started getting younger, in the eighties the Little Crocodiles started polishing their teeth. And I was born then, and so was Lesley."

"Yes, but - "

"Magic wasn't burnt out. How could it be? If it's subject to the same thermodynamic laws as everything else, and it seems to be most of the time, then it can't be created or destroyed, only transformed. Or scattered."

Thomas tries to pull his mind away from the dead of Ettersberg and understand what Peter is saying. "If the weapon was some sort of magical atomic bomb, it would've produced fallout."

"Yeah, exactly. All the magic the thing drew out of your friends and the other wizards and the boys at Ambrose House, it was atomised. Broken down and carried off in the wind. Maybe that changed it a bit. We know it's started popping up in new places. Me and Lesley aren't exactly from 'established bloodlines.'"

Ghosts, vestigia, all those lost lives thrown like dust into the air, losing their form and individuality, coming back as something new. Desmond's quantum reincarnation. "'Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run.'"

"Pardon?"

"Nothing. I'm not sure if it's science or metaphysics you're proposing."

"Yeah, that's magic for you."

Thomas looks at his empty glass, his hand that can still faintly feel the bloodied cheek of a man who died generations ago, who never lived to see thirty or accomplish anything but war, whose body was probably burnt to ash in Buchenwald's crematorium as his ghost was shattered into fragments. Some of whose magic perhaps radiated through an embryo in 1988 and made Peter Grant a wizard.

Desmond, the man Desmond who loved rugby and detective novels, brown ale and mediaeval motets and the Lake District and Thomas, is dead and lost. Peter's theory isn't a comfort for that. But it is, like Peter, a hope.

*** 

On Armistice Day, Thomas takes the packet of sandwiches and thermos of tea that Molly insists on giving him and drives up to Ambrose House. He wanders the nettle-invaded grounds, plucking the occasional weed as a gesture against chaos, and then moves through the old classrooms, the dormitories, the Head Boy's study that was his in 1918. Boys and masters look out at him from old photographs he never bothered to take down from the walls. He knew some of them, knew the life and personality behind the high collars and antiquated poses. Traces of them linger in the school's vestigia, which are weak but still present.

This is the first time he has been here for any reason but necessity since he finished carving the names on the wall.

He comes to the wall, eventually, and reads over every name on it. The last is Desmond Tolhurst. The D is crooked; Thomas had sat for hours before he could make himself start carving that final name, and by then his hands shook with fatigue and emotion. They are shaking now, slightly, as he wipes the dust away and runs his fingers along the hollowed-out shapes of the letters. All those little absences where once there was a man.

"I remember you," he says. "Wherever you are. I haven't forgotten you." And he sits for a while with his ghosts, with his memories of the dead.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This story contains Holocaust references, deaths (not of major characters) in battle, and discussions of grief and emotional trauma.
> 
> Buchenwald was, indeed, located at Ettersberg; I think something like this general scenario is what Aaronovitch has been hinting at in canon.
> 
> The day after I got my Yuletide assignment, while I was in panicked "oh dear what will I _write_?" mode, I happened to buy a copy of U. A. Fanthorpe's _Selected Poems_. I was startled, while reading through it that night, to discover a poem called "Rising Damp," which is about "the fervent little underground / Rivers of London." It includes lines about the sound of the hidden rivers: "A silken / Slur haunts dwellings by shrouded / Watercourses, and is taken / For the footing of the dead." So I began to think about ghosts, and this story was born.
> 
> Speaking of poetry, the lines Thomas quotes towards the end come from the final stanza of Tennyson's _In Memoriam A. H. H._.


End file.
